When in the middle of a browsing session by a first user and the first user wishes to share certain screen content of a displayed page with a second user, typically the first user will start an instant messaging connection with the second user and paste an address of the page in the IM client. The second user then must open a browser if not already open and navigate to the page. The second user must then determine where to focus in the displayed page by communicating with the first user using the IM chat connection. This is difficult and confusing and can be quite frustrating.
There are other known solutions to this problem, such as Webcasts, Netmeetings and Follow-me techniques. Each of these techniques has drawbacks. In the case of Webcasts and Netmeetings, screen sharing is poor in terms of response time, color performance is poor and network performance degrades as users are added. In Follow-me techniques there is no continuous peer-to-peer data exchanges and every user uses his or her own network connection. Nevertheless, only page addresses are shared and there is no way to determine where on a page each user is focusing. This is especially frustrating on large pages.